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Scott Stinson: Why reporters keep chasing athletes

Despite locker-room cliche and boilerplate, there's a chance to see a raw human moment

It shouldn’t be a franchise-enveloping crisis when Phil Kessel occasionally refuses to offer up his bland pronouncements, but nor is it the case that media should give up on the notion of the pre or post-game comment. (Dario Ayala/Postmedia News)

TORONTO — After the last practice before the Toronto Maple Leafs opened the season against the Montreal Canadiens, James van Riemsdyk sat in front of his locker-room stall. He was asked about the Leafs-Habs rivalry. He responded with boilerplate.

The phrase “we have to take things one game at a time,” was used, and not with irony. Crash Davis would have been proud.

It happens. Scrums with athletes are often similarly bereft of insight.

Last weekend, after the CFL East semifinal between the Montreal Alouettes and the B.C. Lions, Brandon Rutley sat in front of his stall while a few reporters waited for him to finish a phone call to his girlfriend. The Als’ running back was in tears, his still-taped left hand wiping away the moisture as he talked. The call over, he stood up, sniffled, and talked about how much the game — he ran for almost 100 yards in his first real action all season — meant to him.

Montreal Alouettes running back Brandon Rutley didn’t hide his emotions from the media following the CFL East semifinal last weekend. (Phil Carpenter/Postmedia News)

He had been trying for four years to do something like this, he said. A day earlier, after practice, Rutley said he had scraped the last of his money together to make it to a CFL free-agent camp. The Alouettes signed him, then cut him in August. He only made it back to the practice roster when the starter was hurt a couple weeks later.

It was a raw human moment: a 31-year-old who had the day of his career, not long from when it looked to be over.

Such exchanges are rare, but they are worth noting when, as has happened again this week, the narrative develops that the media shouldn’t bother seeking comment from athletes because “they never say anything anyway.” The thing is, sometimes they do.

Phil Kessel is not one of those athletes who does. He sparked the latest discussion of media access to players with his terse “get away from me” blow-off of TSN Radio reporter Jonas Siegel after a humiliating loss to the Buffalo Sabres on Saturday night.

Former Leafs GM Brian Burke then offered that Kessel shouldn’t have to talk to the “pukes” in the press every day anyway. It is unclear if by pukes he meant specifically the Toronto media of which he can now safely ignore, or also those reporters in Calgary, where he now works. If so, awkward.

But Kessel is hardly pursued by a rabid mob that never gives him a moment’s pause. He often slips out of the locker-room before reporters are allowed in, or otherwise manages to be unavailable. The Kessel Run: not just an obscure Star Wars reference. From what I’ve seen, this is generally fine with the local media. There are other players on the Leafs who are happy to talk, and no reporter has ever filed a story that hinged on a piece of insight from Kessel. It just isn’t his thing.

So, no, it shouldn’t be a franchise-enveloping crisis when the Leafs sniper occasionally refuses to offer up his bland pronouncements, but nor is it the case that media should give up on the notion of the pre or post-game comment. Athletes are no different than politicians, with whom I have some experience, in terms of an aversion to meaningful discussion. The key difference is that players can just say nothing, while politicians will say it by using as many words as possible. Few would dispute that the vast majority of reporter-politician exchanges are not particularly fruitful, but no one argues that the media give up asking those questions.

Often questions are posed that seem utterly wasted — “will you ask that minister to resign?” — because everyone knows the answer will be negative, but there is value, too, in having that on the record. Sometimes they say things that are unexpected, too. There was no politician in recent memory who had developed a more pointless relationship with the press than Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, whose ability to not answer questions — “anything else? — was a thing to behold. And then one day last spring, he announced that he had, in fact, tried crack cocaine. He even had to prompt reporters to ask him about it. Sometimes, the routine scrum changes the story forever.

It is highly unlikely that Phil Kessel will offer the sports equivalent of that moment — “ask me that thing you keep asking me about whether I want to see the coach get fired” — but at some point he might say something surprising.

That’s really the point. The media doesn’t know ahead of time what exchanges will provide useful information. You have to see where it leads you. And, yes, though politicians are elected representatives and athletes are not, both answer in a way to a paying public. Seattle Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch has been dinged with US$100,000 in fines this week for not talking to the press, precisely because the NFL is aware that access to the media, and by extension to the public, is part of the deal.

Joffrey Lupul, one of the chattier Leafs, earlier this season said he knew players on opposing teams who looked forward to playing in the Air Canada Centre because all it took was an early goal to get the crowd to turn on the home team. But he also dismissed the notion that Toronto was unique in that way. “I played in Philly,” he said, grinning. Both comments, from the same scrum, gave some first-hand insight into topics endlessly debated in Toronto. Useful, in other words. At other times, access to players can result in stories that couldn’t otherwise be told: Shea Weber discussing the mechanics of his booming shot, or Ray Allen describing how his last-second three-pointer that saved the Miami Heat’s 2013 season unfolded.

Scott Stinson’s first paying gig as a journalist was covering the Women’s World Weightlifting Championships for the Kitchener-Waterloo Record in 1997, which if nothing else convinced him that journalism... read more was a far better career choice than weightlifting. He later worked for Toronto-based Post City Magazines, becoming Editor-in-Chief, then started at the National Post in 2000. He has held a number of positions at the Post, from copy editor to reporter to Night Editor to National Editor. In the spring of 2010 he became a columnist without portfolio, writing for the news, comment, arts and sports sections, with specialties in television and sarcasm.View author's profile